Book: Mark Morris: The Deluge
- Published: 2007
This post contains spoilers.
London is destroyed by a sudden, massive flood, which subsides as quickly as it came. The survivors—people who happened to be in the top floors of high-rise buildings—are hunted by monsters that can take almost any form. What will become of humanity, once all the canned food goes bad?
I found this book on a charity bookshelf at a convenience store. I almost didn't pick it up, because the gold-lettered serif text on the cover (plus the word "Deluge") made it seem like a Left Behind-style Christian airport novel. The art mixes sunny buildings with a gloomy brown horizon in a way that just can't be taken seriously, but I recognized Clive Barker's name in the endorsements, and the back cover blurb confirmed that it was indeed horror. I placed my loonie into the donation box and took it home, and within an hour of reading, I knew that I was in good hands.
The Deluge follows a group of survivors who do what you'd expect in the circumstances: scavenge for supplies, bicker amongst themselves, encamp in various abandoned structures, administer DIY medical treatments, and inch toward some long-term goal that vaguely promises safety. Steve and Abby, a music store owner and his teenaged daughter, are the closest things to main characters, and the narrator jumps to other viewpoints as well: Max, a black teen athlete; Sue, an ex-cop and survival enthusiast; Greg, a retired paediatrician with a level head, and so on. Steve and Abby are headed for Scotland, where Abby's school (a restored ancient castle) is perched on high ground. They convince the other survivors to accompany them, and a travelling group is formed.
The story's source of conflict escalates from meeting basic human needs, to fending off gangs of hostile survivors, until it reaches what I assume Mark Morris was most interested in writing about: shapeshifting, man-eating monsters. Sue encounters such a being fairly early in the story, and later, the group is deeply unsettled to find that one of their own has been an imposter for a long time, eagerly helping with camp chores as it waited for an opportunity to strike.
The monsters take the form of the last animal they have eaten; in their natural state, they are blue, sparking blobs of inscrutable geometry that strain the eye to look at. Imposters maintain their cover as best they can, and when exposed, resort to verbal sophistry to waste their captor's time. (While reading, I couldn't help but think about the AI products that have emerged in the past few years, and how they latch onto writing devices that are considered elegant—yes, like em dashes, which show up quite a bit in The Deluge—and run them into the fucking ground.) Time and time again, the monsters prove to be wily and capable adversaries.
The group does make it to Scotland, and they do hole up in Abby's school-castle on elevated ground, mixing with another clique of humans. Things, of course, go awry, and while a handful of battered, bitten, bloodied protagonists do manage to escape (off to pursue yet another goal on the distant horizon), the prognosis is bleak.
The writing is tense up to the last page or so, and then, that's that. While I thought the ending was a little unsatisfying, the journey was still pretty entertaining. As for the cause of the flood and the monsters, we are left in the dark along with the survivors.